Cilantro Lime Compound Butter

Compound butter with cilantro and lime! Great with corn-on-the-cob, veggies, shrimp or steak!

Photography Credit:
Elise Bauer

A compound butter or herb butter is a great way to dress up corn-on-the-cob, veggies of all kinds, chicken, fish, prawns, pork, steak, you name it.

What’s a compound butter? It’s just butter mashed up and mixed with herbs or spices which then flavor the butter. You can either use it right away, or roll it up in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for later. Just cut slices from it to flavor steaks, chicken, shrimp, veggies or pasta.

Here’s one of my favorite compound butter recipes, Southwestern style, with cilantro and lime. Do you ever make herbed butters? If so, what’s your favorite combo?

Elise Bauer is the founder of Simply Recipes. Elise launched Simply Recipes in 2003 as a way to keep track of her family's recipes, and along the way grew it into one of the most popular cooking websites in the world. Elise is dedicated to helping home cooks be successful in the kitchen. Elise is a graduate of Stanford University, and lives in Sacramento, California.

Besides herbed butters, which are a natural this time of year, my partner Sara loves spiced butters! Allspice butter is fantastic on pancakes and waffles, and she has a wonderful recipe for pumpkin 5-spice butter that goes incredibly well on muffins and is super on just plain old toast.

My fiance and I have made several herbed butters to use with our cooking. Two of the most recent were lemon dill herbed butter and a chive, garlic, and pepper herbed butter. The lemon dill herbed butter is amazing on fish and has also rendered tasty on buttered bread as a side when we steam mussels. The chive, garlic, and pepper herbed we’ve used in vegetables and on steaks. I’m very excited to try this particular compound butter because I use limes and cilantro in my cooking all of the time! Thanks!

We make lots of lime butter every summer to put on corn and veggies and well, everything. The only thing that we do differently is add the zest from one whole lime to the mix – it really punches up the flavor.

I laughed when i saw the theme of this post as my students refer to me as the compound butter queen.
The all arrive at 8:00, sit in lecture til 11:00 and then hit the kitchens often not eating until 4:00. I would always drum something up for them as a snack and often it was some kind of compound butter and a loaf of French from the stores.

Given my obsession with dill, I make a dill garlic butter! Spread over thick slices of black, Russian bread and sprinkled with sea salt, it’s simply knee-weakening! I will need to try the lime-cilantro butter though – I am a huge fan of cilantro!